ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2017
How camouflage works.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 78 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
78 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Pooled it
- Predator responses to prey camouflage strategies: a meta-analysis.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Pooled it
- Chromatic Contrast Alone Does Not Predict Predation Risk in the Longhorn BeetleEcology and evolution · 2026Article
- Convergent evolution of dynamic camouflage: humidity-responsive shell colouration in arboreal snails.Zoological letters · 2026Article
- Article
- High Contrast Markings Can Negate the Benefits of Transparent Camouflage.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Matching Multiple Backgrounds: Egg Camouflage Across Different Habitats in a Shorebird.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- DSWFNet: dual-branch fusion of spatial and wavelet features for road extraction from remote sensing images.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Identification of camouflage military individuals with deep learning approaches DFAN and SINETV2.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Visual contrast from background features and dynamic illumination contributes to three-dimensional camouflage in cuttlefish.The Journal of experimental biology · 2025Article
- Camouflage Using Surface Disruption: The Importance of Corners Versus Edges.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Fluttering in a Changing World: Effects of Urbanization and Nectar Plants on Butterfly Movement Patterns.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Intraspecific Variation in Dorsal Colour Patterns ofEcology and evolution · 2025Article
- Altitude and ground brightness explain interpopulation variation in dorsal coloration in a lizard.Current zoology · 2025Article
- Revealing the Concealed in Monocular and Binocular Vision.Vision (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Stealth and deception: Adaptive motion camouflage in hunting broadclub cuttlefish.Science advances · 2025Article
- IRFNet: Cognitive-Inspired Iterative Refinement Fusion Network for Camouflaged Object Detection.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Environmental Gradients in Lizard Colouration.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Evolutionary Drivers of Conspicuous Spots in Velvet Ants (Hymenoptera:Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Coloration in a Praying Mantis: Color Change, Sexual Color Dimorphism, and Possible Camouflage Strategies.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
18 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
For camouflage to succeed, an individual has to pass undetected, unrecognized or untargeted, and hence it is the processing of visual information that needs to be deceived. Camouflage is therefore an adaptation to the perception and cognitive mechanisms of another animal. Although this has been acknowledged for a long time, there has been no unitary account of the link between visual perception and camouflage. Viewing camouflage as a suite of adaptations to reduce the signal-to-noise ratio provides the necessary common framework. We review the main processes in visual perception and how animal camouflage exploits these. We connect the function of established camouflage mechanisms to the analysis of primitive features, edges, surfaces, characteristic features and objects (a standard hierarchy of processing in vision science). Compared to the commonly used research approach based on established camouflage mechanisms, we argue that our approach based on perceptual processes targeted by camouflage has several important benefits: specifically, it enables the formulation of more precise hypotheses and addresses questions that cannot even be identified when investigating camouflage only through the classic approach based on the patterns themselves. It also promotes a shift from the appearance to the mechanistic function of animal coloration.This article is part of the themed issue 'Animal coloration: production, perception, function and application'.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.